Ryan Reynolds Wants Out of the Box

Buried tells the story of a contractor buried alive in Iraq. Blake Lively, who appears with Reynolds in the superhero film he is now making, Green Lantern, describes the mood before a Buried screening that had been set up for the Green Lantern cast and crew in New Orleans. What they already knew gave them some trepidation. The whole of Buried consists of footage of the buried man—Reynolds—in his coffin. The whole film. The camera never once leaves his enclosure. How could that work, or be worthwhile, or even tolerable? Reynolds himself had much the same reaction when he was first told about the script: "I just thought, There's no possible way that could be any good."

"Everybody loved Ryan, and they all wanted to go and support the movie," says Lively, "but they all thought, 'Okay, this will be interesting to see how this turns out.' As much as I like Ryan, I thought, 'I don't think I can watch anybody in a box for an hour and a half.'"

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It is one sign of how far Ryan Reynolds has come that anyone now would even consider it. "My career," he notes, "has been an inch at a time." Its gentle gradient began with some teenage acting and has slowly risen through a sitcom, some modestly successful comedy films, some modestly successful noncomedy films, small roles in bigger or better films (Wolverine, Adventureland), and finally a starring role in a big hit (The Proposal). "There was," he says, "nothing meteoric about anything I've done."

Reynolds is Canadian. His father and mother met in high school in Vancouver, British Columbia. After graduation, his father became a cop. When they were told that they couldn't have children, they adopted a boy and called him Patrick. To their surprise, Mrs. Reynolds then became pregnant. That was Terry. To slightly less surprise, she became pregnant a second time, and Jeff was born. Now they had three boys.

"For me," says Ryan, "they thought, Wow, it'd be great if we could keep trying and have a daughter." He pauses with intent. "They got an actor."

This is a joke that contains within it something that is not a joke at all—not his failure to be a daughter, but his failure to always be the kind of son a Reynolds boy was expected to be. "My family is as far from a stage family as you could ever possibly find," he says. When Ryan started acting at school, it was not something he chose to advertise when he came home. "Even if my father wasn't speaking to me, he would never, ever miss a baseball game. Even if he was upset with me for a month at a time over some trivial bullshit, I would still see him standing in his trench coat over there at my football games in the rain. But the acting world, that whole stuff was just so foreign to him. He would never come to that stuff."

Though Ryan describes his mother as "extremely present, incredibly caring, and ready to listen," his father clearly set the tempo and tone of family life. After leaving the police force, he became a food broker: "I think he carried a great deal of stress on his shoulders, and he carried that stress home with him, too. There was a very short fuse. Sometimes it felt a little like a military barracks. You know, get the fold exactly right on the bed, make sure there's no speck of lint anywhere." Ryan says that the punishments were rarely physical; instead his father would use "silence as a disciplinary measure—very old-school."

All of this had consequences. "I feared disappointing my father more than anything in the world," he says. (Even as he set himself upon paths that inevitably would do so.) "I was a really nervous kid. I was extremely sensitive. Incredibly perceptive. I think I was very keen to preempt anything that didn't feel good. I hope this doesn't come off as corny, but it really helped me be an actor. I mean, when I was a kid, I felt like I was this skin-covered antenna. And I could never get this antenna down. I was so aware of everything around me. I would watch people—looking for signs of danger all the time. It was so acute that I really was able to jump into other people's skin." From vulnerability, opportunity: "When I was 13, I parlayed that passion into a means to escape."

Fifteen was a Nickelodeon series about 15-year-olds. It was a Canadian production, and each local school picked its best four drama students to put forward. Ryan wasn't chosen, but he took the bus after school to the cattle call anyway. On the first day, there were 4,000 hopefuls. Day by day, the numbers were whittled down, until just thirteen of them remained—the cast.

Only one obstacle remained—telling his parents. He hadn't mentioned to them what he'd been doing. "That was nerve-racking. I was scared they wouldn't let me go." Whatever his insecurities, he had confidence in his ability to persuade them. While his father may not have empathized with Ryan's acting dreams, Ryan knew he'd like the idea that his son had beaten out the thousands of other people.

Though the initial series was shot in Canada, for the next two summers the show moved to Orlando. "I think I basically sold my parents this bill of goods that it was going to be some kind of Christian reform camp that happened to be a television show," Reynolds says.

After finishing school, he settled into a routine of working two jobs—at a bar, followed by a midnight shift at a Safeway. He enrolled in some college courses, including a criminology class, in which he lasted only forty-five minutes: "I got this galactic-sized black hole in the pit of my stomach that this was the wrong place to be." At the urging of a friend, he resolved to move to Hollywood to make a go at acting. Just before he left, he landed a role on The X-Files, then being shot in Vancouver, as a high school jock seduced and murdered by two possessed girls. It was there he received some demoralizing career advice. When Reynolds revealed his future plans to Rob Bowman, the director of that episode, Bowman was not exactly encouraging.

"He told me never to go to Hollywood," Reynolds remembers, "because I'd never make it there, first and foremost. And secondly, that I could have a very small yet profitable career here in Vancouver doing small parts. Being hung by the neck by twin witches. 'Stay small.' It was a crushing moment, I must say. It was also inspiring, though." Of course, he went anyway, and was soon cast in a sitcom called Two Guys and a Girl.

Ryan didn't tell his parents that he'd dropped out of college, let alone that he'd moved to California, but eventually he got in touch.

"I called them from a pay phone," he says. "I remember it very distinctly. And I told them I was in Los Angeles. I told my father I'd been there for two months. He hung up on me."

The sitcom lasted four years. In the summer break, he would head off to Europe to backpack, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone. He tells me a long story that involves him being escorted by the police out of Amsterdam after a confrontation with a large Moroccan man in a Raiders jacket who took exception to the way Reynolds refused his persistent offers of cocaine. (It wasn't that Ryan was so squeaky clean, just that his vices had been misidentified: "I was no angel, trust me—I was 21 years old, and I was in Amsterdam…") Reynolds eventually told the man to fuck off, a response which drew a kick. "I said, 'If you kick me again, I'll break your nose,' " Reynolds explains. "He kicked me again, and I broke his nose." After that, things further escalated and got much more serious—there were friends with knives, and chases, and he was glad to get out of town.

After the sitcom, Reynolds resolved to be patient and wait for the right kind of opportunities. He seems undecided as to whether Van Wilder—a "goofy gross-out college movie" that was being shot in six weeks on the cheap—was one of those opportunities, or something he just decided to do while he was waiting. The end result is reasonably repulsive in places (most famously in the scene where Ryan and his cohorts masturbate a dog to fill pastries for their enemies to eat) but also sneakily affecting. Though it wilted at the box office, it soon found a vigorous afterlife on DVD. "For years after that," says Reynolds, "I was Van Wilder."

At best, this was a mid blessing. "It made me the party guy," he says. "I would walk into a bar and people would start lining up the shots. You could sum up my career at that point as a free shot at a bar." This was neither who he was nor who he wanted to be. "I know it affected me more than I'm revealing, because I know that I went years without even saying the words 'Van Wilder.' Even now, when I say it, it's a bit of a big moment for me."

He saw a rough cut of Van Wilder before it came out, but he has never watched it since. At least he got that far. "Early on in my career," he says, "there were a lot of movies I didn't see."

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Buried was shot in just over two weeks in Barcelona, Spain. Reynolds, naturally, spent the whole shoot in a coffin. The director, Rodrigo Cortés, wanted him to rehearse for a week beforehand, but Reynolds refused: "I said, 'Look, I don't want to rehearse, but I'll give you my last drop of blood, I promise you.' And he said, 'I promise you, I'll take it.' " This wasn't purely metaphorical—during the shoot, Reynolds was constantly cut by contact with the unfinished wood of the coffin, his hands were regularly burned from the lighter he uses through much of the film to illuminate his constricted surroundings, and a bald patch formed on the back of his head where it rubbed against sand on the coffin's floor. Almost no one on the set spoke English. At night, suffering from terrible insomnia triggered by his daytime imprisonment, he would Skype home or find himself reading the same pages of A Confederacy of Dunces over and over again. "I'll never, ever in my life complain on a set again after being on that set," he says. "Sixteen, seventeen days of doing that… It was such a state of emotional distress."

Given this extreme and extraordinary scenario, perhaps the most remarkable thing about Reynolds's resultant performance is its overall restraint. It's not hard to imagine what many modern actors might have done. Faced with such a strange opportunity—playing a man who has been buried alive! with a camera that never leaves you!—the temptation to crescendo into some of the most over-the-top anguished award-hunting acting could have proved impossible to resist. Blake Lively describes how quickly the misgivings abated at that cast-and-crew screening. "Within two minutes, I was glued to the screen," she says. "I don't think anybody was expecting what they saw." When I speak to Cortés, he makes clear that he imagines Buried not as a cult curiosity but as a major mass-audience suspense blockbuster. "I'm hoping it's successful enough that somebody parodies it," Reynolds notes. He'll wait and see: "People keep saying, 'Oh, what a risky move to do a movie like that.' And I keep saying, 'Well, it's the least risky movie you could ever do, because if it doesn't work, nobody will ever see it—it's about a guy in a coffin.' "

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On the poster for Van Wilder, Reynolds can be seen brandishing a cocktail in his raised hand, a toga and Tara Reid draped around him, both hanging loosely enough that you can also see the fine muscle definition of his chest and upper arm. But the poster is a lie. The Ryan Reynolds who made Van Wilder did not have this kind of body; a body double was used instead.

"I'm ready now," Reynolds concedes. His remarkable torso was first developed during rehearsals for Blade: Trinity, the unsatisfying continuation of Wesley Snipes's vampire series. "Everything went so horribly wrong on that set," he remembers, though he still takes some pride in the film's most celebrated linguistic invention ("you cock-juggling thundercunt"). At least Blade: Trinity gave him the body. He worked out for six months beforehand. "It was like a project. I just did everything they told me to."

Right now he has that body again. ­Reynolds is at pains to point out that this isn't his natural, or permanent, way of being, just something he is currently doing for the third time, for Green Lantern, after Blade: Trinity and The Proposal. (Precisely why a New York publishing assistant—his character in The Proposal—should have, or need, this level of muscular definition is unclear, other than that he is the star of a movie that will often find him partially or fully unclothed in Sandra Bullock's company.) "It was a strange sort of sleight-of-hand trick I learned—I could do it again if I needed to and get there faster if I needed to."

On the Green Lantern set, I watch him eat his usual plate of steamed chicken, salmon, broccoli, carrots, and rice. On the kitchen counter of the house he rents in New Orleans is a huge jar of a white powder called Isolyze, primarily whey protein. Wherever he is, he snacks on these orange bars called Zero Impact Pumpkin Supremes—"sort of like a pumpkin made out of cinder block," he quips. It takes his co-star to spell out the full grim reality of his commitment. "If you saw him coming to work at five in the morning, when I could barely open my eyes and he'd been up for two hours in the gym…," says Lively. "If everyone had that discipline, they, too, could have abs of steel."

What works for muscle definition has aided him in other areas. "I have a discipline that has served me very well in my career and in my personal life," he says, "and that's gotten stronger as I've gotten older. I've always felt if I don't just have a natural knack for it, I will just outdiscipline the competition if I have to—work harder than anybody else."

I think all of this somehow relates to a few rough patches he went through along the way. At one point he mentions being in therapy for a couple of years in his midtwenties: "I think a lot of people reach these kind of psychic speed bumps. I just couldn't see the forest for the trees." Things came to a head when he was 29. (This is around the time he split from Alanis Morissette, to whom he'd been engaged for almost three years.) "I had this hard-knocks kind of attitude of 'Just keep your head down and your eyes up and grin and bear it.' I realized it was time to just effectively light a match to my life and walk away. And I did that. It's the best thing I ever did."

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"He always pushed hard," says Ryan's brother Terry. "He used to play football in Kitsilano, where we grew up, when he was maybe 10, and that was his proving ground in some ways to my dad. To sort of show that he could play sports and he could be the jock. That kid had more concussions than was legally allowed. I'm guessing he had between four and six concussions, maybe more—I think you're supposed to stop playing after three. I remember my mum saying on a Saturday, 'Be quiet, be quiet, Ryan's sleeping,' and I would say, 'Why in the hell's he sleeping at four in the afternoon?' 'He's got another concussion.' That kid got his head knocked more times, and he'd always get back in the game. There was my dad on the sideline saying, 'My son's playing football.' And I don't think Ryan wanted to throw in the towel even if he got his bell rung."

In November 2008, Ryan Reynolds ran the New York City Marathon. He had never liked running. This time there was no doubt: It was for his father.

About fifteen years ago, Ryan's father was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. His mother told Ryan, but for many years it remained undiscussed between father and son. Slowly the disease has progressed. "It's pretty advanced for him now," says Ryan. "He's having a real tough time of it. He's at an extended-care facility." The marathon, which Ryan ran on behalf of the Michael J. Fox Foundation (he is now on its board of directors), was Reynolds's reaction. "I wanted to find some way to transfer that anger I was feeling," says Ryan. "The anger I was feeling with respect to my father being ill was really in response to feeling apathetic—I wasn't doing anything about it, so I was sort of watching this guy suffer."

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The secret truth of superhero movies is this: With great power comes great indignity. Ryan Reynolds is the Green Lantern. In the DC comic books, and eventually on-screen, this means that he is a human member of an intergalactic police force, someone who wears a ring that confers on him many magical abilities. In reality, this means working relentlessly from January until August in New Orleans, spending much of his time in a kind of thin gray one-piece bodysuit. It's an absurd outfit—slinky, drab, and emasculating. The gray is covered in places by black stripes and white circles and squares, as though designed by a color-blind Aborigine. None of this will be seen in the movie—the uniform is a motion-capture suit, over which the Green Lantern's costume will be digitally layered in postproduction—but it is what Reynolds has to live with, and within, for all these months. "My fantasy dancing jammies," he says. "Kind of ridiculous, I know." And it feels worse than it looks. "It's made of actual woven misery," he says. "Whatever material they've used, they've managed to make it the most heat-conducting substance known to man. I literally begged them to just put me in a nonbreathable rubber unitard." New Orleans has been sweltering. He describes a recent location: "It was like shooting an entire movie inside Alec Baldwin."

This afternoon a newly empowered Green Lantern meets two aliens who will train him in his new powers and role. Everything is shot against a blue screen with orange letters dotted over it. One of the aliens is played by a man on stilts. Reynolds cowers on the ground in his gray dotted one-piece as the man on stilts leers toward him.

"You smell funny," the would-be alien tells him.

"You smell," the Green Lantern improvises, "like a bag of assholes."

They have been in New Orleans a long time.

The following Sunday, in a local bar he likes called Yo Mama's, he orders, as a rare indulgence, a peanut-butter burger while we discuss the kind of media chatter that now hovers around him. "Ninety-nine point nine percent of it is just absurd," says Reynolds. "Silly, you know. And then maybe a relative will call me and ask if I adopted a baby from Ghana." This is, presumably, a specific example, for the previous week's Star magazine has declared: "Ryan and Scarlett are already working with a U.S.-based adoption agency, reveals a source, and they've narrowed the search to Ghana or Ethiopia." (He will clarify that this is complete nonsense—"No, no, I've not adopted anything"—and later tell me, talking about his ambitions: "A few years down the road, having a family. That's years away at this point.")

In an attempt to calibrate the level of delusion that surrounds him, I ask him about the gossip magazines' other recent hot story—that he and his wife have just bought a home in Louisiana. ("Scarlett Johansson has swapped Los Angeles for rural Louisiana—the actress and her husband Ryan Reynolds are the proud new owners of a rustic farmhouse in the state.") This, at least, seems like it might be truer, given that there are photos of the home in question. And Reynolds confirms that they have indeed bought the property.

"Three years ago," he says.

How do things change when you get married to someone very famous?

"Things change when you get married in general. But in terms of being a couple that's in a public situation and speculated about and all that nonsense, it's changed a little bit. I'm a little more guarded, I think. I'm a little bit more wary of having my relationship turning into a soap opera. I've just unilaterally not addressed it. That's kind of been the fail-safe for me."

There's a perception that the two of you have decided to be really careful about any kind of public presence.

"I think it's embellished upon. It hasn't been some covert operation. I mean, certainly the wedding was, but I believe anyone should have the right to have a private wedding ceremony. I think if anything's sacred it should be that. But for the most part—I can only speak for me, as one-half of that relationship—I choose to remain as private as possible without being secretive."

Part of the media has it that you being referred to as "my Canadian" [as Johansson called him as he looked on from the audience when she accepted her Tony Award in June] is all part of an inability to say the word "husband" in public.

"No, I think that's just a cute moment between a husband and wife. People can turn it into whatever will sell the story, the magazine. They can say whatever they want to say. That's fine."

All that aside, presumably this is a pretty good part of your life.

"It is. Yeah. It's the best part."

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Thirteen times, Ryan Reynolds skydived. He was 18, just out of high school. A couple of his friends were into it, so he went along. His friends enjoyed the experience and grew in confidence with each jump. He did not. "It was a dick-measuring contest I failed miserably at," he says. Each time it was terrifying, and each time was worse than the time before. For him, there was no savoring the majesty of the open skies or the illusion of flight; everything that might have been was overpowered in his head by the sound of the single phrase "Oh shit," screamed again and again.

One memorably bad jump was the third. Another of the jumpers in the same plane got so scared that once he was already out on the strut of the plane, he wanted to come back in. That's not allowed, because it could endanger everyone. Ryan liked their instructor, Keith Perepelkin, who was always making faces at you the whole time, trying to make you laugh even while you were falling in fear, but when that guy wanted to come back into the plane, Perepelkin simply did what he was supposed to do—he gave the guy a kick, sent him on his way. "I saw that," says Ryan, "and that screwed me up a little bit."

Ryan's thirteenth jump was worse. His chute did not open. As he plummeted downward, ironically, that was also the calmest he ever felt in midair. He could feel his heart rate slow and his focus grow. At around 3,000 feet, he followed the procedure that had been drummed into him so often it was muscle memory, releasing the main chute and opening the secondary. He can remember the small pop the CO2 canister on his back made as it opened the chute that would save him. After he landed, Perepelkin tried to persuade him to go straight back up, told him that if he didn't go back up that day he would never go back up again. Ryan refused. And Ryan has little doubt that he never would have gone back up, even without what happened the following week.

Firestorm was a movie about smoke jumpers that starred the football player Howie Long. One scene required a stunt in which a man jumped from a helicopter down the side of a granite monolith cliff face known as Stawamus Chief. Nobody knows quite what went wrong, but neither of the stuntman's chutes opened in time, and that was how, on October 31, 1996, the life of Keith Perepelkin, Ryan Reynolds's skydiving instructor, came to its premature end.

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He sits on a sofa, his MacBook Pro next to him, in the beautiful old house he is renting in New Orleans's Garden District. He lived in a hotel for a while, but "the whole place smelled like old-man pants." His screen saver is a picture of his brother Terry in full Mountie uniform, sitting at the breakfast table eating Cheerios with his young son. On a whim, I ask to see his most-played list on his iTunes. Top—with 456 plays—is "World Spins Madly On," by the Weepies. The rest of the top ten, all of which have more than 150 plays: Gomez's "See the World," the Be Good Tanyas' "Ootischenia," Magnet's "Duracellia," the Damnwells' "Jesus Could Be Right" and "For My Own Good," and four songs from the National: "Green Gloves," "Start a War," "About Today," and "City Middle." For contrast, I ask him to show me what has had twenty-five plays, a list that includes songs by CocoRosie, the Eels, Elton John's "I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues," and three songs by his wife.

He tells me that he thinks this house is haunted: "Doors are slamming in the night. The thing I find most disconcerting is that I wake up sometimes and the dog is staring into the bathroom from the foot of the bed." The dog is Baxter, whom we've just taken for a walk along the levee. Baxter came into Reynolds's life when he and his wife were on a road trip driving from Los Angeles to Lafayette, Louisiana, last year. They were stopping at shelters on their way, looking for a dog to give to a friend to replace one that had just died, and found Baxter instead. As he talks, Reynolds occasionally plays with the two wedding rings he wears on his ring finger. There's also a tattoo of some writing he's not keen to explain inside his left wrist, and a tattoo of the Nine O'Clock Gun that goes off each night in Vancouver on his left forearm, and at least one more elsewhere. He explains that he wishes he were without them. "I got them when I was younger and before I knew better," he says. "Tattoos to me are like the Walmart of rebellion. I think I was looking for some kind of outward display of anguish that I was a serious person." How a man tries to prove himself reveals plenty. There is a time in life when a man feels compelled to show off; the evidence of who he really is. And then, especially if things go his way, there comes a time when he does not.

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